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Hot-Shot
Hot-Shot was a series of comic strips that ran in The Daily Express newspapers in 1976. It was reprinted along with other James Bond comics in the Nightbird paperback book. Plot When Fatima Khalid is chained to the top of a tower to be vulture bait, James Bond hovers in to save her with his Heli-pack. Elsewhere, a jet liner is mysteriously downed on the orders of a Mr. Huliraya. At MI6 headquarters, M is notified of this, the fifth airline crash that the Eblis terrorists had taken credit for, and noting that Bond is in the area, voices hopes that he is on to something. After rescuing Khalid and confirming her identity, Bond asks Fatima about her Eblis connections. Fatima however, despite being a Palestinian freedom fighter, was not connected to Eblis, and considered them maniacs whom she was hunting herself. She suspects that Eblis is a front organization designed to lose support for the Palestinians, and she was on her way to meet a contact named Ibn Awad, who claimed to have discovered the head of Eblis when she was captured. She leads Bond to the warehouse where she and Awad had arranged to meet, but they discover Awad's body, allegedly mauled by a tiger. The lights then cut out and they hear the tiger's roar. Bond picks up a chair and advances in the dark before discovering that the tiger had been a recording on a miniature tape deck. They were however, able to take a note from Awad's hand, reading "Huliraya". Being unable to decipher its meaning, Bond takes it to Indian Intelligence, and is informed that Huliraya is the wealthiest businessman in all of India. Bond brings his case up with Bill Tanner, who is able to confirm that Awad was one of fifteen victims killed by tigers in the last year, and that Huliraya's ship had been spotted near one of the places that the airliners had crashed. Bond goes to investigate the ship, and discovers that Huliraya is not on board, and that he had taken his private helicopter away to an undisclosed location. Bond was quickly thrown off the ship, but on reporting his findings to M and Tanner, he proposes that Huliraya is secretly Dr. Julius No. He then receives a phone call from Khalid, revealing that she had discovered a villa called the House of the Tiger, and suspected it was connected to Huliraya. Justa after she hangs up she is taken away by a man with tiger paw gloves. Tanner then informs M that an American Optic Physics expert named Dr. Frank Mulroy had last been located at Huliraya's company before the airline disasters. When James lands in Tangier, he is ambushed and taken captive by some of Fatima's fellow freedom fighters, who accompany him to the House of the Tiger, where he requests to see Mulroy. He is told by the Company Secretary that Mulroy was discharged, and then returns to the car to tell his associates that if Fatima was kidnapped, the orders came from the House of the Tiger. That night, they begin faux road work outside the House of the Tiger so as to mask the rotor noise from Bond's Heli-pack as he dropped onto a balcony inside the House walls. Bond quickly finds Fatima, but they are cornered by Shirkahn, the House's security tiger. Bond is able to hold it off by lighting a curtain on fire and using the blaze to block the tiger in the room before closing the door. As they leave, they realize that the House of the Tiger is completely deserted, and Fatima informs James that she had heard guards saying that Huliraya was leaving by sea. After working with the other freedom fighters to find an oil tanker named Shirkahn, M assigns Bond the task of hijacking the tanker to make sure that Huliraya really is Doctor No, and to prevent any more airline disasters. With the help of a military submarine, Bond poses as a stranded castaway and is taken aboard the Shirkahn before being incapacitated and taken to Huliraya. Bond voices his suspicions about Huliraya's identity, and he reveals himself as Doctor No before taking him to see Fatima being lowered into an on-board shark tank. As the ship passes a fishing boat, Bond and Huliraya go to see Mulroy, who is manning the Hotshot cannon, a solar death beam mounted to the ship's deck that is responsible for downing all of the planes. They then reveal to Bond that the target plane, hosting a middle-east ambassador from the United States, is laced with welding powder that will make breaching the hull much easier for the Hotshot. Bond then dives overboard and is taken up by the submarine. He has the Captain halt the Shirkahn on the grounds that he wants to investigate the Hotshot dish on the deck, while they transmit a warning to the jetliner with the ambassador. The pilot turns the plane around, preventing their demise. Bond then flies to the Shirkahn with his Heli-pack and saved Khalid, who had been taken to the top deck, and then fired a machine gun through the thin hull of the oil tanker, causing the ship to explode with the accumulated heat of the fuel tank and the Hotshot gun before it could fire on the submarine. M then congratulates Bond when he and Khalid return to land. Characters Horak Bond.png|James Bond|link=James Bond (Literary) Farima Khalid - Profile.png|Fatima Khalid|link=Fatima Khalid Dr No Horak - Profile.png|Dr. Julius No (Mister Huliraya)|link=Dr. Julius No (Literary) Frank Mulroy - Profile.png|Dr. Frank Mulroy|link=Dr. Frank Mulroy Horak M.png|M |link=M (Literary) Bill Tanner by Yaroslav Horak.png|Bill Tanner|link=Bill Tanner (Literary) Horak Moneypenny.png|Miss Moneypenny|link=Miss Moneypenny (Literary) Gallery > Titan Nightbird.jpg|The Nightbird paperback in which War Cloud was finally published. Mister Huliraya - Profile.png|Dr. No as Mister Huliraya Heli-pack.png|Bond and Khalid on Bond's Heli-pack Huliraya.png|The Shirkahn tanker mounted with the Hotshot weapon Huliraya 2.png Shirkahn 3.png Category:James Bond comics